CloudFlare Guest Blog Post: Liew Cheon Fong

My blog (http://liewcf.com) was frequently coming under heavy server
load because of malicious traffic. The malicious traffic to my blog
frequently brought down my dedicated server, with a server load pushing
up to 100 CPU. While my hosting company worked very hard to keep the
server online, even their 24/7 server monitoring only helped reduce the
downtime associated with malicious traffic.

I was looking for help with my blog and was thinking about migrating my
blog to a high-end secured web hosting company. Given the hassles of
migrating hosting providers - not to mention the fact that I would
likely be paying higher monthly fees for hosting - I was frantically
looking for an alternative that would help my site stay up when my
server went down. A friend of mine advised me that I should try
CloudFlare, a relatively new service that could
help mitigate problems with malicious traffic and other service outages.
After doing a bit of research about CloudFlare on Google, I decided to
create an account to see if that would help me with my problems.

Setting up CloudFlare was an easy process, one that took about five
minutes for me to switch my authoritative name servers over to
CloudFlare, and switching over the name servers would be a far easier
task than migrating to a different hosting provider. If I wasn't happy
with CloudFlare, it would only take me a few minutes to switch the name
servers back to my original registrar. Much to my surprise, my server
load dropped rapidly and I was no longer seeing the effects of the
attacks on my server.

In addition to the free security protection that CloudFlare offers,
CloudFlare also works like a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to cache
your website static content and speed up the page load time. I
personally decided to upgrade to the
Pro account to take advantage
of the more advanced security functions, which was important to me
because of the frequent attacks, and because the more advanced caching
with the website preloader
helps make my pages load even faster.

My CloudFlare dashboard has revealed the following benefits to me as a
blogger:

-My page loads are approximately 73% faster (.38 seconds after
installing CloudFlare, 1.43 seconds before installing CloudFlare).
CloudFlare calculates the speed by sending the same request twice: once
through the CloudFlare system, and once directly to your site, bypassing
the CloudFlare system)
-CloudFlare is saving me about 38% on my bandwidth costs.

I highly recommend CloudFlare to any site that is suffering a high
server load or that has issues with malicious traffic. You can get
started with a free CloudFlare account (yes, it is FREE!) to reduce
server load, increase page load time, and get protected! In a nutshell,
if you need a free (or paid) service to protect your website and
increase site performance, try CloudFlare.

Notes:
- You can only modify your name servers settings if you own your own
domain name.
- You will have to switch your name servers to CloudFlare to get their
protection and CDN services.
- Doing a dig or checking whois would reflect CloudFlare's name servers.
- CloudFlare, much like any other rapidly growing startup, has had some
growing pains and is not entirely problem free. But they always solve
problems promptly and are continuously improving the system. CloudFlare
support has been highly responsive via both CloudFlare
help or
Twitter.

Disclosure: While I did receive a CloudFlare
t-shirt
shortly after subscribing to CloudFlare , I did not receive any
compensation to write this article.